A string of eye-patterned glass beads from the late Spring and Autumn period of China, unearthed in the tomb of Zhao Qing in Jinsheng Village, Taiyuan, Shanxi, and in the collection of the Shanxi Museum. (Infographic/Figure)
If the cultural industry also wants to select a so-called Chinese character of the year, this character in 2022 may be "big". Although phenomena such as huge museums, large exhibitions, and big data have been around for years, many things are getting bigger with the naked eye. New museums and galleries tower like castles on the outskirts of the city, and their foyers and exhibition halls are built in strange sizes; The exhibitions inside the exhibition hall also pursue grand narratives, and the permanent exhibitions of museums at all levels often tell the big history of the local area, and their special exhibitions in 2022 seem to be more inclined to a large-scale retrospective; Online exhibitions have also evolved from individual combat to multiple museums joining forces, with more digital resources and larger databases often causing viewers to fall into a cyber ocean of digital images. If you can send a blessing to this "great", I hope it is tolerant and great.
Many new museum debuts, how do you evaluate?
In recent years, the construction of new museums has caught a double express train of urban infrastructure and cultural museum boom. Many cities are building new museums in new urban areas, and more museum titles have been created to adapt to the concerns and research hotspots of the new era. Accompanying this boom in new museums is the problem of how to make better use of space in the future. According to data released by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the per capita area of museums has increased by 124.85% in the past ten years, while the number of visitors has increased by only 32.7%. Many new museums to be built in 2022, such as the Hehuang Cultural Museum in Qinghai, the Palace Museum in Hong Kong, the new Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Museum Phase II, and the new Tibet Museum, all have huge spatial volumes, and will be enriched by richer exhibitions and more frequent special exhibitions in the future.
The frequent appearance of professional archaeological museums is one of the highlights of the new museum in 2022. In this year, the Shaanxi Archaeological Museum and the Hubei Archaeological Museum were officially opened one after another. The Shaanxi Archaeological Museum is China's first thematic museum of archaeology, and the most eye-catching exhibits in the opening exhibition are, of course, the epitaph of Shangguan Wan'er and Luo Wanshun. The epitaph of Shangguan Wan'er has its own flow, and the first exhibition of Luo Wanshun's epitaph by Yan Zhenqing Shudan, unearthed in 2020, is the first authentic early calligraphy of Yan Zhenqing unearthed through archaeological excavations, and its archaeological significance may be more in line with the theme of the archaeological museum.
Compared with the dazzling "treasures" in ordinary museums, archaeological museums are more specialized, such as the Shaanxi Archaeological Research Institute, which has collected more than 200,000 archaeological cultural relics specimens. These cultural relics specimens may look like just a piece of rammed earth, a piece of stoneware, not so much like a "treasure", and the content of the exhibition is also based on the development of archaeological disciplines, which is a little boring for many people, and there will be a certain cognitive threshold. Sadly, this specialized museum seems to be welcoming more lively visitors than equally professional visitors. Some netizens found that less than ten days after the opening of the museum, many exhibits were damaged to varying degrees. Some rammed earth and primeval raw soil used for display have missing corners and scratches. An archaeological soil layer that preserves the remains of the ancient Huaxian earthquake is painted with a careful heart pattern by tourists.
Cloud exhibitions are not a vassal of offline exhibitions
Since the outbreak of online exhibitions in museums in early 2020, after three years of development, a normalization trend has formed, and almost all important offline exhibitions are accompanied by corresponding online exhibitions. With the adjustment of epidemic prevention and control policies, offline exhibitions are bound to return to the right track, and online exhibitions should not be limited to copying offline exhibitions in the future.
In December 2021, the State Council issued the 14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Digital Economy, proposing to promote the development of online digital experience products in scenic spots and museums, and the development of new cultural and tourism services such as cloud exhibitions and immersive experiences. In the future, in addition to moving offline physical exhibitions online, the real breakthrough point may lie in the maximum integration of resources in the museum industry, using cloud resources to innovate exhibition models, and opening up cloud curation, cloud viewing, cloud sharing and other links. A two-year consecutive exhibition may be enlightening in integrating resources and breaking down the boundary between virtual and reality.
On March 8, 2022, the West Lake Art Museum's "Beauty Walk - Images of Ancient Chinese Women" opened, showing the spiritual and material world of ancient women through more than 160 women-related cultural relics. Also opening at the same time were the Anhui Museum's "Green Sideburns and Zhuyan - Painting Exhibition on Women's Themes in the Ming and Qing Dynasties", Jiangxi Provincial Museum's "Porcelain Wu - Women's Theme Art Exhibition", Suzhou Museum's "Jiangnan Beauty - Suzhou Museum Collection of Female Paintings Exhibition", and Huzhou Museum's "Beautiful People Like Pictures: East Asian Women's Figure Painting Art Exhibition in the 19th and 20th Centuries". At the same time, they use digital technology to achieve "cloud interaction" between the five museums, and visitors from all over the world can view the live pictures of the exhibitions of the other four museums through multimedia screens and browse the exhibits of each museum.
In fact, such a multi-museum linkage was born out of a purely online exhibition on March 8, 2021: "Beauty Walk - Ancient Chinese Women's Image Cloud Exhibition". At the time, the large-scale online exhibition brought together more than a thousand digital images of ancient women from 32 museums, allowing the exhibition to break through collectors and geographical limitations. Many of the exhibits in the 2022 offline exhibition were previously exhibited online in 2021. The innovation of the "Beauty Walking" exhibition for two consecutive years lies in the fact that the online exhibition is no longer a vassal of the physical exhibition, but precedes the physical exhibition, and integrates resources, plans, arranges and views in the virtual world, which then affects the physical museum, and promotes the curatorial cooperation and resource complementarity of multiple museums in the real world.
Of course, the 2022 cloud exhibition also has a small regret. On August 30, the Palace Museum's exhibition "Illuminating the Heart of Heaven and Earth - Imagery and Imagery of the Chinese Study" was officially launched in the Noonday Exhibition Hall. With the theme of the Chinese Study, the exhibition explores and explains the cultural core of the "Chinese Study" through various cultural relics related to the Study. What is more innovative is that this exhibition is not a simple list of cultural relics, but the works of contemporary artists and architects such as Xu Bing and Zhang Yonghe are juxtaposed with ancient cultural relics, forming a dialogue between ancient and modern along the same theme. Inspired by the Panorama paintings of the Forbidden City, Zhang Yonghe's work "Curious Mirrors" uses the principles of specular reflection and perspective to create a journey of strange mirrors in the exhibition hall to sit side by side with the Yongzheng Emperor. The exhibition practice of dialogue between ancient and modern is rare in domestic cultural exhibitions, and this exhibition in the Forbidden City can be said to be at the forefront of curatorial ideas.
Is the revitalization of cultural relics and live streaming cultural and creative competitions really reliable?
The revitalization of cave temples is the highlight of the revitalization of cultural relics in 2022. Dunhuang, Yungang, Longmen, Dazu and other grottoes have introduced digital technology to varying degrees after the 21st century, and most of the archaeological reports and catalogues published in the first volume of the "Dunhuang Grottoes Archaeological Report", "Longmen Grottoes Archaeological Report - Pinggutai District" and "The Complete Collection of Dazu Stone Carvings" are obtained with the help of digital technology.
In recent years, the activation of cave temples has taken a step further on the basis of digitalization, and virtual reality and 3D printing technology have moved replicas of cave temples into mobile phones and museums. Unlike the "Cloud Tour Dunhuang" mini program launched in 2020, which focuses more on interaction and cultural creativity, the "Digital Tibetan Scripture Cave" launched by the Dunhuang Academy in 2022 focuses on Dunhuang documents, which is more academic.
On April 15, 2022, the "Longmen on the Cloud" WeChat mini program developed by Longmen Grotto Research Institute was officially launched. The function list of "Cloud Dragon Gate" includes 8 columns such as "Exploration", "Courtyard Collection", "Micro Trace Recognition" and "Grotto Protection", which are extremely rich in information, online video and audio are readily available, and relevant academic papers are attached to each category. In fact, "Dragon Gate on the Cloud" elevates the previous single cultural relics protection project to an academic scientific research project, and can be regarded as a thematic digital library with the theme of Longmen Grottoes.
The revitalization of the Yungang Grottoes is also on the way. There are more than 59,000 statues of all sizes in Yungang Grottoes, which is huge and complex, which means that it will take a long time to complete all the data collection and digitization of Yungang Grottoes. At present, the digital information collection of the entire Yungang Grottoes has exceeded 1/3. It is worth noting that Cave Twelve, which completed the construction of digital modeling and 3D information system, was reproduced at an equal scale by 3D printing and toured in many museums across the country. Cave 12 is 14 meters deep, 11 meters wide and 9 meters high, and there is no precedent in the world for such a large-scale full-scale replica.
The restoration of Tongwan City is another wonderful case of cultural relics revitalization in 2022. Tongwan City is the capital of the Great Xia Kingdom established by Helian Bobo, a descendant of the Xiongnu in the Sixteen Kingdoms period, and the Tongwan City recorded in history is magnificent and brilliant, but now only ruins remain. The Yulin Cultural Tourism Department invited academic teams from the Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage and the School of Construction and Planning of Beijing University of Technology to conduct restoration research on the Tongwancheng site and make a digital model. In this case, the important thing is not how magnificent the restored Tongwan City is, but the technical standards and academic research paradigms involved in the restoration process have created precedents for later generations.
An important branch of cultural relics activation is cultural and creative products. Although the boom in museum culture and creativity has continued for many years, the hot-selling cultural and creative products on the Internet are mostly concentrated in a few head museums, and in 2022, more local museums will join the competition for the cultural and creative market. Many museums in Jiangxi Province were unknown in terms of culture and creativity in previous years, but the provincial museum association hosted the "Most IN Cultural and Creative Battle - Provincial Museum Cultural and Creative Live Broadcast Competition" in 2022, which gathered more than 500 cultural and creative products from 43 museums in the province and broadcast the cultural and creative competition live throughout the whole process - of course, the audience can buy cultural and creative products at any time during the live broadcast process.
Perhaps local museums can form a stronger marketing synergy by using this kind of "hypermarket" method of collective packaging and centralized display, but some museums set up live broadcast scenes directly in the exhibition hall, which will undoubtedly affect visitors' on-site viewing of the exhibition. It is a self-evident question whether the sales of cultural creativity and the exhibition itself are more important than each other. The questions raised by the Jiangxi Provincial Museum Association in this competition may be common problems encountered by all local museums in cultural and creative industries: "How to organically integrate the local culture and cultural and creative products of the museum to create your own brand cultural and creative products?" How to use new media platforms to effectively market cultural and creative products? How to increase traffic while staying true to the museum's roots? "In the foreseeable future, these questions will haunt museum cultural and creative practitioners.
Offline exhibitions, archaeological exhibitions dominate the list
The significant increase in archaeology-related exhibitions is undoubtedly an important trend of offline exhibitions in 2022, and it is also the inevitable result of the extension of archaeological fever to cultural exhibitions in recent years. Large and small exhibitions of archaeological achievements were served to the audience's banquet like "Eight Treasures Sent by the Royal Chef". The newly opened Hubei Archaeological Museum uses three major exhibitions, "Millennium Context-Yangtze River Civilization Archaeology Exhibition", "Century Project-Three Gorges Archaeological Achievements Exhibition" and virtual exhibition "Yangtze River Civilization Exhibition", to tell the great historical process of the middle reaches of the Yangtze River from one of the "starry sky" to the "diversity and integration" integrated into China.
Two exhibitions that can also inspire each other are "Shoveling the Central Plains – History Exhibition of the Henan Academy of Cultural Relics and Archaeology" and "Zhaizi China – Henan Xia Shang Three Dynasties Civilization Exhibition" at the Shanghai Museum. 2022 marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the Henan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, and the development of archaeology in Henan Province is accompanied by the gradual revelation of the pre-Qin history in the Central Plains. Two exhibitions, one focusing on artifacts and history, and the other focusing on the archaeologists behind artifacts, correspond to each other, adding a sense of historical vicissitudes.
The 2022 exhibition of the Dunhuang Academy also won the first place by the archaeological exhibition. "A Thousand Miles - Special Exhibition of Dunhuang Grottoes Archaeology", jointly organized by Wuhan University and Dunhuang Academy, is a large-scale review of the archaeological history of Dunhuang. Most of the exhibits in the exhibition are the first time they have left Dunhuang. What this exhibition wants to tell the audience is that the story of Dunhuang lies not only in the cultural relics themselves, but also in the people who stick to Dunhuang.
"Guoyin Chengzuo - Song Liuling Archaeological Achievements Exhibition" is one of the smaller archaeological exhibitions in 2022, on the one hand, because there are not many archaeological relics unearthed in the Song Liuling Tombs, and on the other hand, the curators focused the exhibition on the interpretation of the famous object system. The panels in the exhibition hall are full of the relationship between mountain geography and archaeological clues, making the whole exhibition more academic and professional.
In addition to these specific archaeological exhibitions, many conventional exhibitions, if placed ten years ago, it is difficult to imagine that they would have taken into account the archaeological background of the exhibits in their presentation ideas, and in 2022, many exhibitions have covered themselves with an archaeological background. For example, "Changyun in the West Sea: Qinghai Road on the Silk Road in the 6th and 8th Centuries" by the China National Silk Museum, the exhibition focuses on the history of the Tuyuhun Kingdom and the life of the Tuyuhun people, but the curator specially opened an archaeological unit in the exhibition to introduce the archaeological achievements of the Tuyuhun Kingdom in the past three decades, and also exhibited the restoration model of the archaeological tomb.
Coincidentally, the Hangzhou Museum's "Walking in the Landscape - Hangzhou from the Perspective of the Southern Song Dynasty" also adds an archaeological dimension to the exhibition. From the perspective of archaeological excavations, the curators sorted out the basic appearance and secular life of Hangzhou in the Southern Song Dynasty. The information density of the entire exhibition is extremely large, and the text on a display board is often as many as several hundred words, and the entire exhibition hall is filled with dense text. Of course, this highlights the academic accumulation of the curators and the academic information that the exhibition wants to convey, so that the audience can gain more knowledge. However, after all, exhibition is a physical activity, and how to strike a delicate balance between academic and people-friendly exhibitions for the public is also an aspect that curators need to consider.
The anniversary exhibition remains an important theme of the 2022 exhibition. The 700th anniversary of the death of Zhao Mengfu and the 370th anniversary of the death of Chen Hongshou and Wang Duo have commemorative exhibitions in relevant museums. The Tokyo National Museum's commemorative exhibition for Zhao Mengfu is uneventful, but its enviable catalogue of exhibits illustrates Japan's collecting strength in the field of classical Chinese culture. Shaoxing Museum's "Gao Guqi Horror - Chen Hongshou Calligraphy and Painting Exhibition" is a carefully arranged tribute to this local sage. The Shaoxing Museum has united dozens of institutions across the country that house Chen Hongshou's paintings, almost all of which have been collected.
In the cracks of these exhibitions that pursue big history and collect big documents, there are some "small exhibitions" that cut in from small angles, but can glimpse the wonderful artifacts and life. The "Colorful - Glass Art in the Exchange of Ancient East-West Civilizations" launched by the Art Museum of Tsinghua University is not small in terms of volume, but it takes the glass in the East-West exchange as the entrance, traces the daily beauty of various civilizations along the Silk Road from the daily glass, and allows Chinese audiences familiar with the western transmission of ceramics to understand a thousand-year history of the eastern transmission of glass.
Glass is one of the most important man-made materials in ancient times, and since the Bronze Age, the ancient Eastern and Western civilizations have shimmered with the brilliance of glass. From the late Spring and Autumn period about 2,500 years ago to the modern era, glass products and glass crafts have successively traveled to the Central Plains by land and sea, and ancient Chinese glass craftsmen have also created a unique oriental glass craft system and artistic interest. Most of the extraterritorial exhibits included in the exhibition are from the Ikuo Hirayama Silk Road Art Museum, while the glass products unearthed and manufactured in China bring together the collections of many museums in China, and the colorful glass of the ancient Near East and the warm jade-like glass made in China come together, and its mutation and inheritance bear witness to the rise and fall of the Silk Road.
The Guangdong Provincial Museum's "Solemn Vientiane - Chinese Water and Land Painting Art Exhibition" seems to have the same thinking thread. Exquisite and complex land and water paintings are not a mainstream category in Chinese painting, but they are closely related to Chinese's view of life and death, and by decoding the brushstroke information in land and water paintings, Chinese's understanding of life and death is almost surfaced, and they give the viewer not only the aesthetic appreciation of the painting, but also the awe-inspiring blow received when understanding religious painting.
Southern Weekend reporter Wang Huazhen
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